PISCATAWAY – Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz wouldn't stand a chance against four Rutgers University students.

The I Love Lucy characters famously couldn't keep up with a chocolate factory's confectionary output, but the industrial engineering seniors have taken out much of the human element with an automated chocolate-making machine, using just $600 and a semester’s worth of work. It required a few all-nighters, but because of sanitation concerns, they weren’t able to get a caffeine boost from their product.

“For the most part, it probably wouldn’t kill you,” said one of the group members, Kwabena Agyemang, of Piscataway.

Operative word: probably.

The device, one of several senior industrial engineering projects that were on display Friday morning at a presentation on the Piscataway campus for family, students and faculty, can take orders via text message, email or over the Web, no human interaction required. Within minutes, three chocolates infused with either crisped rice or walnuts are cooling at the end of a conveyor belt.

The inventions like the chocolate-maker could help save time and money in labor costs – for example, another group of seniors developed a conveyor belt that automatically packs cardboard boxes for shipments from companies like Amazon, taking into account the value and fragility of the contents.

When students talk about their inventions saving money, what they really mean is that a company doesn’t have to pay a worker to figure out how many packing peanuts should go in a box of clothes versus a box of fine china.

“That’s kind of a sad byproduct,” said David Kim, who worked on the packaging project. “It’s making the workforce obsolete.”

But Kim acknowledges that a well-trained worker will work faster and better than his machine does in its current state. You can never fully take people out of the equation, even though many of the inventions reduced manual labor.

“I think it’s important to know how to do things as efficiently as possible, but also to know how to do it ourselves,” said Josue Jolibois, of Old Bridge, who helped develop a machine that could detect pavement cracks and fill them with sealant.

The invention with perhaps the most theatrical display, and the most potential to save lives, was the portable human airbag.

Worn around the waist like a diaper, the airbag uses an Android phone’s gyroscope to detect when a person is falling. Instantly – at least in theory – the phone sends a command to a canister of carbon dioxide, which inflates an apparatus around a falling person’s hips before they reach the ground. The device also sends a text message to a cellphone with GPS coordinates and insurance information, a sort of digital, automated “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

Javier Jaramillo, of North Plainfield, and Neel Mainthia, of Piscataway, hold onto a mixed martial arts dummy adorned with the device, hovering over an inflatable mattress. They let it fall. The airbag fails to inflate, and the dummy lands with a smack.

Despite the mechanical failure, the software is sound. A few seconds later, a cellphone’s text message alert goes off:

“Help!!!” the message reads. “Neel has fallen!”

After two more failed attempts to inflate the airbag, Jaramillo and Mainthia are joined by fellow group members Ronald Josias and James Neal, who help them fiddle with the device. The Bluetooth technology isn’t communicating with the canister of C02. On the fourth try, owing to the human intervention, the machine works. As the dummy falls, the bag inflates with a hiss.

Nearby, Kim says of artificial intelligence in general: “There are some things computers can do that we can’t even dream of. But there’s no lost hope for humans.”